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> We need open source services and open APIs with an agreement on a communication protocol that goes beyond HTTP. I don't disagree, but wouldn't that be a "Twi

• asim 4y ago
  I think ActivityPub isn't so much a protocol as it is an API. Doesn't matter that it has a spec, it's just something defined on top of HTTP. There' an API doc, you can implement it. Has some nice interop. Essentially ActivityPub is a Mastodon API at this point. Twitter is a centralised platform, a Twitter protocol would just end up looking like a documented API spec which anyone could then implement. It's a bit like AWS S3. S3 has now been implemented by most of the major cloud providers and there's some other open source software that does it too. Does it make it a universal storage service? I'm not so sure, but at least you know you can get data in/out of these various clouds using it. Social as a protocol came close in XMPP but anything in this feed/timeline model doesn't have a good solution yet and I'm not seeing ActivityPub as that either. I'd be more inclined to lean into an open API for social and a protocol for communication between services that lets us build on top of these things in a standardised way. Because even open APIs evolve and move too quickly to bake too deeply into a protocol. We need to strike a balance between the things that need to evolve versus the thing that need a stable interface. Protocols give us stability with an envelope for something that's constantly changing.